Memories and Musings of a Post-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman
Preface to Memories and Musings of a Post-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman
I am a dead man walking—er, actually I
am currently sitting and sipping a highly honey-sweetened cup of
Wyoming-roasted coffee with cream on the back patio of a coffeehouse in
downtown Laramie. The pale-brown liquid
within my cup has grown quite cold over several hours sitting and exposed to
the elements of a high-country afternoon, though ice has yet to form around the
rim. I sometimes gaze into the swirls of
milk fat floating on the surface and the patterns of variously mixed solutions
of bean juice and water and honey and half-and-half to scry with what shapes
might emerge to tell of things present, past or possible.
I don’t mean that someone has me as
their mark, necessarily, or that I am keeping a wide-eye open for fear of
potential assassins, necessarily. My
point with these words is in fact rather more stark. What I actually mean by this opening
statement, these first words in print after flyleaf and front matter, is that I
have already been murdered, and perhaps on as many as five
occasions. The most poignant and certain
instance of experiencing my own homicide occurred one ordinary summer’s day at
dusk in Golden Gate Park, when two bullets were rather randomly and
undeservedly introduced to the inside of my skull after an otherwise pleasant
and uneventful day on Hippie Hill.
In addition to such homicidal intrigues,
I have encountered sasquatch, a skinwalker, holes in space-time, and a
shape-shifter who did her turn whilst astride my lap. In pursuit of romance and the hidden secrets
to life and history, guided by instinct, intuition, chance, and sometimes
helpful deities, I have been granted many such glimpses behind the veils of
normalcy—at moments to my delight, and at others to my terror.
At a certain point in life I decided I
had a desire to unabashedly seek the truths that seemed unavailable in academia
or conventional religion, and to discover what hidden magic and beauty and
adventure this world really has to offer.
I concluded at some moment of disillusionment or discontent that merely
reading books of fiction or supposed scriptures to find inspiration and truth,
else vicariously viewing others’ explorations and adventures on TV or on the
big screen proved insufficient means to satisfy my yearnings to experience or
to satiate a want to know, and thus I decided that I had a need to endeavor the
quest, and by the most quixotic and heroic means I might have need that I might
find what abides behind life’s curtains.
And so I began to live as a wandering
renunciate before I truly knew what this meant or might imply, hitchhiking and
train hopping and backcountry rambling on a simple and more or less innocent
search for answers and quest for love both transcendent and terrestrial. Thus began the ride of my life. Visions and experiences that answered to my
curiosity and were revealed to my searchings surpassed extraordinary, and
indeed met with the sublime, and even Divine.
I have been tailed by a tornado in the
badlands that bore the certain imprint of God made manifest, and have pursued
an apparent apparition of the Goddess across the breadth of the continent. I have crossed the threshold between life and
death more than once, though still I breath, drink, eat, piss, shit, think, and
even occasionally fuck, and thus by all appearance and common indicators, I am
quite alive. In the most recent third of
thirty-six or so years lived I have experienced things most would assume the
stuff of fairy tales or fantasy, mythology or merely a wild imagination.
Yet here I sit, just where I sat some
twelve years ago, and with little if anything overt to show for my years of
questing, labors of love, challenges to the system and changes to myself. I now have a PC upon which I type these
words, whereas then I had a Mac. This
evening I pen (er, type) my early memoirs, whereas then it was my Master’s
thesis I labored to complete. Little
else overt has changed, save that I am now long since estranged from then-wife
and son, church and institution, I have lived over a dozen years more, and
these days don a beret and wool overcoat instead of a thin cotton trench coat
and ski cap. Three fat dreadlocks also
now dangle amidst the otherwise unknotted past-shoulder-length hairs on the
back of my head.
The sun is setting behind the Snowy
Range Mountains, and the oft-ferocious high plains wind is only a gentle breeze
this evening. I’m watching this rather
dull spectacle (compared to the best or even average of Laramie sunsets) from
the back patio at Coal Creek Coffee Company’s downtown coffeehouse and
roastery. A freight train is roaring
past beneath the steel footbridge that spans the railroad tracks which reside
between my vantage and the sunset. This
bridge links the downtown to the Near West Side, and purportedly is or at least
was longest of its kind in the country.
Random pedestrians in wool coats and down parkas pass by both near my
seat and strolling over the human viaduct in the background, faces only
glimpsed between snuggly wrapped scarves and hats pulled low, and fewer I know
now than I knew in days past in this small city on the high plains.
Said painted black steel and concrete
span, occasional trains rumbling beneath, the derelict smokestack tower that
stands ten stories tall behind, and people passing by in warm winter gear
provide an excellent foil for the now dark gray clouds and fading light and
subdued colors of this evening’s sunset show—or would it be the other way
around? Regardless, it seems to me at
this moment, this picture painted in words might offer a poignant backdrop for
you to bear in mind as you read on, dear reader, providing a scene that
appropriately sets the tone for the tales to come in this text.
Before the beginnings of my wild and
weird cross-country adventures, before I tried to make a break from the
system’s sometimes subtle and subliminal hold, I would often sit at this very
table laboriously researching and writing my Master’s thesis, “Non-Essentially
Occidental: Heteroglossia in the
European Discourses on Islam.” Back then
I still held on to some semblance of the assumption that there was a
comfortable place for me within “polite society” and inside the bounds of the
popular consensual reality of Anytown, USA, and its various venerated
institutions.
Never quite finished this thesis, and
thus abandoned hopes of becoming a certified PhD professor-type. Instead I decided to seek the truths of self
and other (and “Self” and “Other”) outside of familiar text and tradition and
institution, to take to the open road to search for evidences of heteroglossia
(many tongues) telling different versions than the officially-sanctioned and
academy-approved, and to find a more personally valid and abiding title or
state of being than “Doctor” or “Professor.”
In this loosed condition, wonderful and
weird magic and mystery unfolded before my sight and other senses. Wisdoms both beautiful and terrible were
bestowed as the wide world opened doors to mysteries archaic as well as
immediate, from revelations regarding obscured secrets of ancient myths and
migrations of ancient Gods and their peoples to the manifestation of divine
plays presented first-hand in my own life-lived. Such accounts are the substance of this bound
book, dear reader, presented for your entertainment, and perhaps for the
enrichment of your own life-lived in this everyday world, where truth proves
more than meets a mere two eyes . . .
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